is pilot pay threatening to kill the future of electric and hydrogen driven aircraft right now there are a lot of companies working on aircraft with Renewable Power sources so what type of obstacles are they facing and is pilot salaries really one of them stay tuned for several years now there's been a huge interest in figuring out how to decarbonize Aviation of course this is because people are becoming more and more aware of the impact that Aviation has on our planet but it's not like nothing is being done aircraft and engine manufacturers are actually working hard on these very issues in several of my videos I've been explaining how much the efficiency of jet engines has improved over the last few decades and how it still continues to improve with each and every new aircraft generation with projects like the CFM rice on the horizon these improvements also look set to continue you when and if it actually enters into service that is but a lot of people feel that even if this design another airframe tweaks could reduce emissions by let's say 20% or slightly more that still just isn't enough and that brings us to Alternative renewable means of repulsion like hydrogen powered hybrid electric or battery electric aircraft and as regular viewers of this channel will know I recently visited a flight school in Sweden called Green flight cat which is Awesome by the way where they they actually do use small electric aircraft for training this is the pipistrel veis electro which is already certified in Europe and I just loved flying that thing it was so much fun and it was so simple to use so simply fact that it only needed four buttons to get it up and running it's this is such a toy it's such a beautiful little aircraft when it comes to teaching basic stick and Roder skills to new students this plane works like any other basic trainer but at the moment it can only be practically used for around 45 minutes with typical VFR reserves and that's quite limiting but again for a flight school there is definitely a lot to like about an aircraft like this not only for environmental reasons but also when it comes to cost the flight that I took lasted around 40 minutes and in terms of fuel or energy consumption this flight only cost about € to do which is about $110 all right I know that it's not that simple because there are obviously other costs involved here as well but even if you factor in the cost of replacing the battery packs that be 500 hours and you spread this and all other maintenance and other costs into this the electrod still cost about half as much as a similar plane with a conventional piston engine per hour these electric planes also have fewer moving parts so it should in theory be more reliable but to be honest this plane could really use batteries with a bit more capacity which pipistrel and its suppliers are very busy working on but the very marginal range of even a small two- seat trainer like this one shows how challenging this technology would be when scaling it up to something that would be able to carry passengers even for short Journeys this really isn't easy and if you have a look around the industry it shows during last year's Paris Air Show renewable energy Aviation projects were still very much on display but unlike previous shows a lot of the hype that normally formed part of these projects was now more let's say subdued a few weeks before the air show techam decided to actually postpone their P volt battery electric program and techam if you don't know who they are isn't a startup at all they are an established maker of single and twin piston engine aircraft who therefore knows how to design and build and also certify aircraft so their decision to basically freeze their electric aircraft program indefinitely got a lot of attention the companies in announcement stated that available Technologies primarily around the energy density and other characteristics of batteries just simply aren't there yet and while some emerging battery Texs looks promising these batteries don't yet have the necessary endurance or the lifetime as techam explained in their really quite lengthy and Technical announcement these news and the less electric atmosphere at the Paris Air Show were followed just Days Later by another very similar story but this time from NASA NASA stated that they would end their own battery electric test project the x57 Maxwell in September of 2023 this meant that this aircraft which also was made by techam by the way would not even fly once on electric power now I don't want to sound pessimistic or defeatist here NASA and techam still learned a lot from those projects and this knowledge will be really valuable when they do have everything they need in order to make this happen NASA's work will for example help the FAA establish certification criteria for any upcoming electric aircraft and there are companies out there who are still testing newer designs with lightweight all composite airframes that might be closer to making at least a nine seat all electric aircraft of reality but as I've explained in previous videos the problem with all battery electric designs is currently how to actually scale them conventional aircraft who burn fuel and therefore get lighter during flight get better and better efficiency per pass passenger as the plane design gets bigger but that's not the same with batteries whose weight obviously doesn't change of the flight but still needs bigger and heavier batteries if it is to carry more people because of this battery electric planes actually get harder and harder to realize as they become bigger and again the endurance of that electric trainer that I flew with only two of us on board is right now only good enough for local training flights but like I said there's still are several battery electric aircraft projects out there so because of what I just explained most of them tend to limit their capacity to under 20 passengers now there are also hybrid electric designs who push this passenger capacity a bit higher to around 30 to 35 passengers and remember these passenger capacities because they will become very important here soon but what about other Technologies like hydrogen propulsion for example and how do pilot salaries come into all of this well I will explain all of that plus whether or not pilot L the aircraft might play a role here after this hydrogen aircraft might well be the key to Bringing Aviation into a more sustainable future but do you know what can make your online presence more sustainable today's sponsor incog incog is a great tool for protecting your online privacy shielding you against scams online harassment and identity theft they work by searching the internet for where your name and data are being sold by data Brokers and then asking them to just remove this data from their services now I know it's crazy that it's even legal to sell that but this also means that you can do something about it and incognate will take care of everything for you as well as keep monitoring compliance for as long as you stay subscribed as part of my sponsor vetting which I always do I tried incog out and I was really impressed with what I saw they quickly identified 65 different data brokers who were selling my data and has as of now removed 62 of those with three still in progress this has led to way less spam in my inbox as well as less Robo calls and other nuisance so if washing the internet free of your personal data sounds interesting well then use the link here below which is incognito.com Menor now and use the code Mentor now to get started with a 60% discount thank you incog now let's continue nice anyway Airbus first an ounc their z e project back in September of 2020 z e stands for Z emission and it's airbus's hydrogen propulsion project now as part of this project they have published various renderings of the different forms that these designs could potentially take depending on a few different factors you see it isn't possible to Simply take an existing airliner design and just run it on hydrogen at least not without some serious modifications and that's because we can't really store High hen inside an aircraft wings as we do with jet fuel because hydrogen needs to be stored at extremely low cryogenic temperatures and that's right now done easiest in a near spherical container the reason for that is that hydrogen is extremely difficult to keep contained under pressure as a gas it is much easier to cool it down into a liquid even though this means getting it down to- 253° C orus 423 de F and then obviously they also have to then keep it at that temperature for quite some time now liquid hydrogen has been used as Rocket Fuel powering the space shuttle and the Ariana 5 rocket for example and this means that the Aerospace industry actually has plenty of experience in handling hydrogen including moving it around in fuel systems at very low temperatures but making this work on Commercial planes still involves a lot of innovation for example we need to find out ways to handling this hydrogen safely in side systems that would be reused consistently unlike single-use space Rockets are today anyway all this means is that this type of fuel will need to be stored inside of the aircraft's fuselage which presents quite a few different challenges but it could also be an opportunity to try some new ideas like a blended Wing body design for example which you can actually see in some of the renderings that Airbus published now in general as I explained in detail in previous videos there are are two different ways for an airliner to get propulsion out of hydrogen and the method that Airbus will select for their first project could have a big impact on the topic of this video you see one way to use hydrogen in an aircraft is to use existing turbofan and turboprop engin and just simply burn the hydrogen inside of them instead of jet fuel this is the simpler method relatively speaking but it still involves modifying the engines to work at higher temperatures and obviously there is also that small matter of figuring out how to store and then handle the fuel but the other way is to use hydrogen to create electricity in a fuel cell if that's done well then this electricity could be used to drive electric motors driving the propellers to then generate the thrust in the right conditions this setup is actually considerably more efficient than using hydrogen combustion but the problem is that this method the fuel cell is technologically even more complicated and crucially it's also heavier and that means that it will be much more diff ult to scale up a hydrogen fuel cell setup to power a really big aircraft Airbus is testing the more complex fuel cell set up on the ground in what they call a iron pod which is basically a big rig that simulates all of the complicated systems of an aircraft but they will also test both of these setups in the air in a modified Airbus A380 actually the first Airbus A380 ever produced this plane is already being modified to have a fifth test engine on a pylon high up on the rear half of the fuselage which looks quite funky but I kind of like it one round of this testing will involve a hydrogen fuel cell electric motor and a propeller and for hydrogen combustion testing Airbus will use a general electric passport engine taken from a Business Jet this light testing will begin towards the end of 2026 and shortly after that Airbus will need to make that decision about which system they will actually go with hydrogen fuel cell or hydrogen combustion and that decision will Define the size and role of its first ever hydrogen airliner this is finally where Pilot pay comes into the equation so far we've only really been looking at these designs in terms of their feasibility from a technical standpoint and while that is obviously a really big hurdle there are also quite a few operational and economical realities that we also need to look into I have previously explained that for Airlines the main factor that determines their profitability is the cost of fuel but there are also other costs to consider like maintenance airport and Airways fees and of course the cost of pilots and cabin crew after the worst of the pandemic was over a lack of Pilots have now meant that the pilot salaries have started going up in quite a lot of places especially in the United States which is the world's most important Aviation Market this trend was especially true for pilots in the regional carriers whose salaries have now thankfully gone up considerably but since this lower original pay of those Regional Pilots was a big part of why regionals existed in the first place I previously predicted that the US regionals might soon actually cease to exist at least as separate entities now that hasn't quite happened yet but something that has happened is that the US regionals today are becoming less and less Regional because their aircrafts keep getting bigger the rules between the airlines vary slightly but in general there are two categories of regional aircraft those with 50 seats for example the crjs 200s and those with 76 seats which are the likes of the crj 700s or Embraer 175s in recent years the 50 seat crj2 200 have been slowly faced out and some of them are being replaced by crj 550s which are basically crj 700s with fewer seats but increasingly the airlines are actually relying more on their 76 seater e175s now this really isn't that surprising because as I mentioned earlier with conventional aircraft efficiency improves when the size goes up and the same is true about a lot of the running costs including the cost to pay the crew so in other words when crew salaries are going up the economics of smaller aircraft becomes worse and I think you can maybe start to see where I'm getting at with this given this fact the industry might not be that Keen on adapting smaller aircraft like battery electric and hybrids with around 20 to 30 seats where they still have to pay those two quite expensive pilots on the operational side it is also likely that at least the first small battery electric and hybrid electric aircraft won't necessarily have much spare range on top of the minimum legal reserves that they will have to have and that means that it is likely that the airlines operating those planes will need to cancel more flights if weather or other factors are un favorable which of course in itself is a really costly process for an airline and that's when we make an Apples to Apples comparison between let's say an electric 20 seater and a conventional 20 seater performing the same route YN FM looked at these problems in great detail in a recent series that he did over on leham news which by the way if you haven't checked out you really should I will link to them below what he pointed out was that things actually get a lot worse if we try replacing let's say a 50 seat jet with two smaller electric planes or 1 76 seater with three of those planes that just doesn't make a lot of sense neither economically or operationally since it would mean the same operational constraints plus two or three times the number of pricey Pilots to do the same thing now I'm not saying that these aircraft won't have any advantages on certain Roots when they become operational but my guess is that these might be on new types of routes that current aircraft aren't even serving today maybe that will be on remote parts of countries which need a lot of short routes of a rough terrain or water like in New Zealand or up in Northern Sweden but if that happens these new type of routs would mean a growth to the existing airline industry which would of course also increase the need for Pilots so since the reason that pilot pay right now is going up has to do with the already existing pilot shortage this might just cause the airlines to be even less interested in adopting this technology there are also more costs like airport and other fees which might not favor a bigger Fleet of smaller aircraft although I think it's probably highly likely that a lot of governments and authorities will wave or drastically reduce these costs to help this type of projects get off the ground to be perfectly honest I actually think that government subsidies will be absolutely crucial if we are to ever see any of these project succeed but that's battery in hybrid electric aircraft what about hydrogen well if Airbus is working on Concepts that will be able to carry between 100 and 200 passengers and also fly up to 1,000 or 2,000 nautical miles well then the scale of the problem is completely different with them a 200 seat airliner or really anything between around 160 and 200 seed could basically fulfill most of the roles of the current middleof the market aircraft like the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 families now of course the 737s and the Airbus a320s have quite a bit more range than that around 3,000 noral miles normally depending on which model we're talking about but for a first Hydrogen airliner something with a 2,000 mile range will definitely fit the game and in the context of this video such an aircraft could well be a one for one replacement of current conventional aircraft which means that they shouldn't be adversely affected by whatever happens to for example pilot salaries at least in theory that is in practice the definition of what constitutes a middle of the market aircraft seems to be constantly growing again for the very same efficiency reasons that I talked about before but not all routs need an all economy 240 seat Airbus a321 Neo as some Airlines have actually discovered recently now of course we still don't know what decision Airbus will take regarding the type of hydrogen propulsion that they will use and with that the possible size of their first Hydrogen aircraft it could end up being much closer to a 100 seat capacity and if gets much smaller than that well then they will face that same type of problem as the battery and hybrid electric aircraft do but of course there are also other challenges here like the fact that only a few dozen airports will probably have proper hydrogen infrastructure to begin with and that is an issue that again will need heavy governmental support in order to be overcome also in this video I have mainly focused on what Airbus is doing with hydrogen there are other companies out there like Sero AIA or Universal hydrogen who are working on processes that would retrofit hydrogen fuel cell engines to a 70 seat Turbo like the atr72 or the q400 the hydrogen tanks will reduce the seat capacity of these aircraft quite a lot which could again make them become a little bit more sensitive to things like pilot salaries but finally what about autonomous aircraft pilotless aircraft is there a chance that companies might develop single pilot or even pilotless airliners to get around the lack of Pilots especially for small electric aircraft well I personally think that that this is highly unlikely I know that some EV tool designs are moving towards that direction but those Vehicles will probably operate out of heliports and other dedicated sites and likely only on predetermined routes I don't think that we are anywhere close to autonomous operations from regular airports alongside with existing aircraft but at least not for now and at least not for a very long time yet but reduced crew operations are being discussed for Long Haul flights that currently requires three or four pilots who take turns resting these operations are being discussed only for the Cru phase of very long flight so it doesn't really apply to the type of routes and technologies that I've covered today but what do you think can you think of another cost that could limit the potential of alternative aircraft propulsion or is there a new aircraft project out there that you think that I should be covering on this channel let me know in the comments below and leave a like when you're down there also consider supporting me by supporting my sponsor and if you want to really get involved in the channels well then use the link here below or somewhere here on the screen to join my awesome patreon crew it's soon time for another hangout have an absolutely fantastic day wherever you are and I'll see you next time bye-bye
2024-04-22